Only One Democrat Deserves to Be Speaker

Nancy Pelosi’s skills are a perfect match for the job, and there is no better choice in the Democratic caucus — it’s not even close.

By Elaine Kamarck

Ms. Kamarck is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of a book about presidential primaries.

Nov. 29, 2018

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The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, surrounded by the Democratic House leadership on Wednesday.CreditCreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times

Nancy Pelosi cleared the first hurdle in her quest to become speaker of the House of Representatives when the Democratic Caucus voted overwhelmingly to nominate her for that position.

The final vote will not come until Jan. 3, when 218 members of Congress will have to vote for the new speaker. Representative Pelosi will need 218 Democratic votes. Yesterday, 32 Democrats voted no on her nomination.

So between now and 2019, Ms. Pelosi has some work to do. But the simple fact is, at the moment, there is no one in the Democratic caucus better for the job. And it’s not even close.

The primary role of a legislative leader has rarely been to serve as the “face” of the party. She is not running for president. It is instead the unglamorous and complex job of making some subset of 435 individual political entrepreneurs come together in the name of a political party.

Ms. Pelosi has already said that she’d give others the spotlight when it came to the public part of the job. In the past, she has not been a regular on TV news shows, including the prestigious Sunday shows. Since 2007, when she became speaker of the House, she has had a couple of chances to give the response to the president’s State of the Union address, one of the most coveted television spots in politics, but she took neither one. Those spots went to two men: Senator Jim Webb of Virginia in 2007 and, in 2018, Representative Joseph Kennedy III of Massachusetts.

Even her detractors say that she’s best at one of the most critical, if not most critical, roles of speaker, which is to court votes and count votes. Counting is a lot more complicated than conducting a survey. It involves understanding the political challenges of each and every member of Congress and then devising a legislative package that can pass. Sometimes this entails compromise; sometimes this entails structuring the vote so that a member can cast a vote against an amendment and sometimes this entails allowing a member to vote against their party — if it already has the votes to prevail.

Ms. Pelosi has shown her toughness over and over. For instance, in 2005, she played a central role in the battle against privatizing Social Security. For the Affordable Care Act, she united both the left and right wings of her caucus. Later, as minority leader, she managed to keep the caucus together enough to prevent the Republican Congress from chipping away at Obamacare.

Like Lyndon Johnson, a Senate majority leader who eventually rose to the presidency, Ms. Pelosi is a machine politician with a progressive bent. To court votes, an effective legislative leader cannot stick to an overtly ideological line. If she were rigid, she wouldn’t be able to hold together a caucus that consists of conservative “blue dogs” and “democratic socialists.”

Finally, a speaker has to be able to win majorities. In the midterms, Ms. Pelosi and her leadership partner Steny Hoyer of Maryland were a very big part of the reason that the party gained at least 39 seats. Mr. Hoyer recruited and campaigned with candidates from the purple or red districts where Ms. Pelosi was viewed as too liberal. She helped raise the millions to make it all happen. They both imposed a stern message of discipline on their candidates, downplaying talk of impeachment and focusing Democrats on pocketbook issues like health care.

Ms. Pelosi will need to convince about 17 Democrats to vote with her. In tough districts in the midterms, some Democrats promised to vote against Ms. Pelosi if elected. Having won, they now find themselves between a rock and a hard place; voting against the overwhelming favorite in the caucus (who also happens to be a woman in a year where women gave Democrats the majority) is a surefire way to make yourself unpopular and ineffective internally. But reversing a promise to your voters in your first act in office is a surefire way to make you look like a shady politician if ever there was one.

The irony here is that while Democratic candidates were being pressured into the anti-Pelosi faction, Republicans were bemoaning the fact that all the time and money spent on demonizing Ms. Pelosi was a waste that could have been better spent talking about the good economy.

Holdouts will be confronted with a lot of pressure to show unity in the opening of the new Democratic Congress. If I had to bet, we’ll be saying “Madam Speaker” for the second time in American history.

Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates.”